OnePlus 5T Review: The Phone Bargain of the Year

Making a mark on the smartphone market is hard enough. Muscling in to compete in the same arena – if not at the top step – doesn’t happen often. OnePlus has bucked this trend over the last three years with its phones of high specs and low prices.

The new OnePlus 5T is excellent – a huge, crisp screen and screaming performance – but it’s coming from a company that is dangerously close to annoying its fans and appearing like it has run out of ideas, even though it hasn’t.

Let’s not pretend here, the OnePlus 5T naturally looks like the OnePlus 5. The front is more attractive with the lack of bezels and fingerprint sensor but the phone itself is largely unchanged aside from the new 18:9 display.

It’s a phone we find to be ridiculously slippery. It’s so thin, and the back isn’t very grippy so snapping it into a case almost a must (see our round up of the best cases for this phone). This is a shame, as the cases don’t show off the excellent premium build underneath. This isn’t a problem unique to OnePlus, though.

Unlike the OnePlus 3T, the 5T does not get a notable bump over the previous generation in terms of core specs. But with a Snapdragon 835 and 8GB RAM in the version we tested (and a perfectly adequate 6GB in the cheaper model) that won’t prove a problem for all your smartphone needs.

The camera set up is now two Sony sensors. The main is 16Mp with f/1.7 aperture while the secondary is a 20Mp with f/1.7 aperture. This is an upgrade from the OnePlus 5, whose secondary camera was an f/2.6 telephoto lens.

The battery life is about the same as the 5, and the 5T shares the same capacity. Dash Charge remains an excellent charging technology even if it only works with the supplied cable and brick. We also saw the 5T achieve four hours of screen on time under fairly heavy usage until it was reaching empty.